The beetle plague devastating North America's forests

IN HOMER, Alaska, jazz singer Mary Jane Shows once belted out songs to her spruce trees every night. Now all the tall trees are dead and Shows has moved away. "It will never go back to what it was," she says.

Just south of Alaska in the Canadian province of British Columbia, artist Annerose Georgeson often gets lost in her home town. The pines that once served as local landmarks in the city of Prince George are dead and gone. "People all over the place are disoriented. Everything looks so different," says Georgeson.

And in the high alpine forests of Montana outside Yellowstone National Park, Jesse Logan, a skier and biologist, has witnessed similar changes. There the ancient whitebark pines, the region's mountaintop guardians, have fallen one by one. These long-living pines once provided highly nutritious seeds for grizzly bears. Logan says that he sometimes feels like he is watching ...

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